Over the past several years, the global internet and associated technologies have revolutionized the way in which a business is able to engage in transactions with customers. The World Wide Web portion of the internet has made it cost-effective for businesses to reach a larger audience of potential customers and more convenient for customers to shop at their leisure. Businesses can, using internet-based product advertisements disseminated across multiple web sites, provide a vehicle for a customer to “click through” to a spot on the business's web site where a purchase can be consummated instantly. Security technology has advanced sufficiently to allow customers to trust their ability to make purchases using a credit card. Further, the internet allows businesses to remove logistical barriers to a customer's purchase, by enabling customers 24-hour access to products, and by eliminating the need for customers to travel to the business's physical location.
Despite appearances, however, internet-based commerce has in many respects made transactions more difficult. From the seller's standpoint, most retail web sites require multi-tiered system architectures involving numerous hardware and software components, and presenting a unified face to the customer requires the complex integration of mission-critical but heterogeneous applications like those involved in marketing, inventory management, payment processing and order fulfillment. For some customers, too, internet-based transactions are more difficult in that they place restrictions on method of payment (usually requiring a credit card, and not accepting gift certificates, exchange credits, cash or checks), and require that the customer wait for goods to be shipped or services to be rendered.
These technological and logistical factors often mean that customers perceive, and react very differently to, the experiences of shopping on the web and in the business's storefront(s), and this “perception gap” creates barriers to increased sales that might be removed with better integration of the business's online and offline presence. For instance, the prohibitive costs associated with maintaining physical inventory in multiple storefront locations prevents many retailers from providing many of their customers access to the full breadth of products they offer, and introduces the possibility that a customer could visit the store, find that an item is not stocked, and go to a competitor's store to buy the item. Also, a business's product line can be greatly affected by the cost of stocking certain products at stores—preventing some businesses from carrying certain slower-selling items, thereby costing them not only the sale of those items but sometimes others as well. For example, certain web-based operations that stock items at few locations, or do not stock certain items at all but merely forward orders to manufacturers or distributors to ship to customers, have come to fill a role that store-based retailers cannot perform economically, thus taking the revenue a store-based retailer might have gotten not only for that product, but for products the store-based retailer might have sold with it (and might, coincidentally, be stocked in the store). Lastly, until recently, most retailers were unable to accept returns of purchases made on their web sites at the store, which not only gave the customer cause to reconsider the purchase, but also required the business to absorb extra shipping costs to transfer the goods back to a central distribution center.
Recognizing the potential benefits, many businesses strive to meet the technological and logistical challenges associated with better integrating online and offline sales channels. However, achieving this goal remains elusive, and those who have come closest to achieving it still bear unnecessary costs as a result. Several retailers, for instance, offer customers the capability, if an item is out of stock, of having a salesperson access a back-office inventory and order-entry system directly from a cashier's register, so that the item can be ordered and shipped to the customer, and payment can be accepted in-store as though a “normal” purchase were being executed. This solution, however, requires that the retailer construct and maintain a customized interface to inventory systems as well as a facility to reconcile payment received in the store with products to be shipped. Further, given that the customer typically perceives the process as compensating for an under-stocked store, it does not allow retailers to minimize the cost of maintaining physical inventory without sacrificing customer satisfaction. At least one electronics retailer takes the additional step of allowing customers to access an “in-store version” of the retailer's web site (typically stored on the retailer's intranet) from kiosks placed throughout the store, from which customers can initiate orders, and pay for those orders in the store. This solution, however, requires that the retailer construct and maintain a separate “in-store version” web site, and deploy separate infrastructure to support it.